It's another multiple of seven on ST-urday this week, which means it's time for another ST potpourri of demos and applications from the major coverdisk publishers of the day. Please feel free to revisit the first of the Demo Derby ST-urdays - ST-urday #007 (which really ought to have been awful James Bond licensed games, now I think about it) - to get a more in-depth explanation for what I'm doing here.
In lieu of a better system for deciding which coverdisks are worthy of exploration, I've instead opted to choose ST Action #29 and ST Format #14: each an edition of a popular Atari ST magazine to be released exactly twenty-five years ago this month (that would be September 1990, in case the site stopped tagging blogs with dates). I mean, if I can't feel old as hell while doing these, what's even the point?
Myth: History in the Making
Now, you all might be more familiar with a certain other Myth: the top-down squad-based RTS games that Bungie put out before they hit it big with Mister Chef and his Hula adventures (I don't follow those games too closely). All I remember from that Myth series is a scary guy with no shirt that turned into birds. This Myth, however, is considerably worse: a game that hops around through time and space and pits the player against various mythical beings. I remember playing this demo and enjoying the silly animations for the bad guys but, once again, not really knowing what I was supposed to be doing.
If the following game looks sorta familiar but not quite, it's because it was later rebranded as a Conan the Barbarian game and released as Conan: Mysteries of Time for the US NES. You can watch JonTron get perplexed by it here, if JonTron is something you're into. (Man, he actually figures it out quicker than I did, though he did admit to looking up a solution on the internet. Pfft, lightweight.)
Welcome to Myth! I neglected to mention that this was developed by System 3: the creators of the Last Ninja, International Karate and, uh, Putty Squad.That's certainly some English there.Demos haven't changed a whole lot in twenty-five years, I'm happy to say. Lots of promises. The sad truth is that the Atari ST version of the game was never finished, despite a lot of admittedly impressive graphics work to distinguish the game from its C64 originator.Curiously, the game opts for this bald little barbarian instead of a guy wearing modern clothing, which is what the original C64 game had. Using a barbarian protagonist instead was closer to the aforementioned NES Conan game. That appears to be the surface of the Sun down there, so let's give it a wide berth. (Fun fact: the graphics artist for this game is also the one who converted Konami's Salamander for the C64. If you recall, Salamander is the Gradius sorta-sequel that had that badass stage with the burning dragons flying out of stars. Clearly the guy liked drawing coronas.)So, the idea of this first stage is to find weapons by killing the flying gremlin things, then using it to collect a sword from the skeletons wandering around (both spawn endlessly, so grab what you need and get out of there).I really like the way the skulls fly off whenever you defeat a skeleton. They look sort of incredulously at you. Hey: don't start nothin', won't be nothin'.When you have the sword, you can cut this sadsack skeleton down and spawn a tough demon with a trident......that you can then throw at this Chimera dude to destroy him and end the stage.At least, that's the idea. I never did figure out what button or joystick combination allowed you to switch between weapons and there's no documentation online for this version of the game, given that it was never released. Still... it looks cool.
ST Format
...Yahtzee?
Before we begin with our second coverdisk - the ST Action coverdisk I selected only had two demos and the second of those refused to run, in case you're wondering why we're doubling up today - I should explain what ST Format was. Unlike its hyperactive rival ST Action, ST Format was the serious computer aficionado's magazine. That meant features that ran the gamut from games to development tools to utility programs, as well as columnists talking about the current status of the Atari ST as a viable platform for developers and the various art and music creation tools out there for same. It celebrated the system's games, but also its potential as a media creation center and its functionality as an office word processor or spreadsheet creator or any other program someone might require to support their livelihoods. If you've ever subscribed to or read a PC magazine, it's the same sort of deal. A lot of people took the Atari ST seriously back then.
All that said, the following screenshots should give you some idea of what sort of content the ST Format coverdisks tended to include:
I don't really show off Atari's "GEM" (Graphics Environment Manager) OS too often but it's essentially like Windows 3.1 but without the ability to dump files on the desktop: it has something to do with the fact that the Atari ST has no built in storage by default. That means any game save files have to be saved onto a separate blank floppy disk, which was always fun. Here's what's on Side A of the ST Format coverdisk.I couldn't get "Grafiti" to run but it seems like a tool that lets you spray your desktop various colors for the heck of it. This "NoBombs" guide tells you what the various crash icons mean: every time the ST freezes or crashes, it shows a list of bomb icons that can stretch across the screen. The number of them determines the type of error you got. This guide lets you demonstrate it with an application that tries to divide by zero, which computers generally don't agree with. It's their equivalent of a "your mom" joke.This is why I don't go into the ST Format coverdisks too often. My eyes always glaze over trying to read this stuff.It also has a Side B with even more stuff: C-Series is an ongoing programming tutorial series from one of the magazine's writers. Diary is also an ongoing "e-column", as far as I can tell. Harly-Fo.Nts is, perhaps obviously, a group of free fonts for use with some common word processor program. Starlc10 and Transp are programs that involve printer peripherals in some way (maybe guides that let you print a page a specific fashion?). Speech? Well, that would be this thing:I love these early text-to-speech programs. The strings the program sends back are the same lines with all the necessary inflections to make the speech sampler sound comprehensible. They sort of look like English-to-Schwarzenegger translations though. Yeah, I suppose I can't really show off a text-to-speech application in a screenshot, huh.
Anyway, these things are invariably neat to play around with but I've never been a particularly tech-literate person who could appreciate them for their utility or their historical significance in the field of computing. I'm definitely no "Halt and Catch Fire" computer whiz (though I have been meaning to give that show a shot). Let's move onto the three game demos that were hidden in the midst of all these inscrutable applications.
Rick Dangerous
Oh jeez, Rick Dangerous. Rick Dangerous has something of a notorious reputation among those who have played it, and not just because of its silly title. One of the missing links between the obnoxiously difficult Spelunker and its modern harsh-but-fair spiritual successor Spelunky, Rick Dangerous is all about bullshit. Specifically, it's a game about a dashing WW2-era adventurer in a fedora and leather jacket (the game makes no bones about its inspirations. Or "no Jones", I should say) who has a small supply of bullets for his gun and sticks of dynamite to remove obstacles, and is frequently killed by enemies, traps and other unfortunate occurrences that the player is rarely able to predict and/or avoid in time. Its trial-and-error gameplay was considered a dealbreaker by many critics, but it has just as many proponents that enjoyed - or maybe just admired - how the game sets up this cheeky, adversarial relationship with the player. It encourages you to defeat it not because there's some fantastic gameplay to enjoy or a satisfying conclusion to work towards, but because you become so obstinate in your anger at its unfair nonsense that you try to reach its finale on spite alone. It's the type of player/game relationship that eventually matured into the "masocore" game design philosophy: the types of game like I Wanna Be The Guy or Kaizo Mario World that push all the player's buttons (rather than the usual inverse) with its sadistic and unpredictable instant-death traps. I suppose there's some serendipity here regarding how this sort of gaming experience has recently hit the zeitgeist with the horrific creations regularly being pumped out by Super Mario Maker.
Rick Dangerous and its 50s-inspired retro sci-fi sequel are the products of Core Design - the UK developer better known for their thematically similar but structurally and philosophically completely disparate Tomb Raider series. Lara Croft still sees her share of random bullshit deathtraps too, but when developing their trailblazing acrobatic action-adventure game Core Design clearly agreed with the idiom that you can catch more flies with honey. Or a fly honey, even.
Welcome to the Rick Dangerous Playable Demo! Man, look at this asshole.This is actually the second-to-last area of the game. Expect even more BS than usual.As soon as you spawn, a dog immediately comes running at you. You have a split second to jump over it. Though it's easy to avoid once you remember it's there, its real purpose is to trip you up whenever you unexpectedly die and are sent back up here. There's that brief period where you let your guard down after you've been killed that the game hopes to capitalize on with this trap. It is not a nice game.The second dog isn't as fast, but it's just as annoying. It'll grab you off the ladder if you're not quick. If you are quick, you can get down the ladder and start running for the next ladder....however, the dog moves just as fast as you do, and you'll never get a big enough gap that you can start down the ladder without it chomping your face off.The idea here is to prompt it into activating while you're still on the ladder. If you're quick enough you can then climb back up out of the way, but it requires some precision.Then there's this Jerry jagoff. He can't be shot because the wall's in the way, and his bullets are timed just so that the next one comes as soon as Rick's finishing his jumping arc. As with the dog, it's impossible to reach the ladder and start to climb down it within the tiny gap it affords you.The trick here, again, involves using the ladder to mess with the timing of the bullets. Once you've configured it so the bullet fires just as you're dropping from the two-second long jumping animation, you have a big enough window to get down the ladder. I just want y'all to understand that it's taken something like 30 lives to figure out the timing behind these traps so far.Here, we simply blow up the wall and take out the Nazi with our gun in quick succession. Because the ST joystick only had one button - a factoid I never get tired of bringing up - dynamite works by hitting the fire button and then down (in that order) while the gun is the fire button and up. It's so easy to just press up and jump instead of fire when there's an enemy barreling towards you (and no, the game does not let you shoot the dogs).Curiously, this room just has three more Nazis for you to shoot and then...The demo abruptly ends after three screens. They even have the temerity to advertise its sequel. That's counting one's chickens before they hatch, surely?
Yolanda
I'm not familiar with the name Yolanda outside of that Freek-a-Leek song, but it's apparently an ancient Greek name that means "Violet". "Violent" would be more apt, because that's how this agitating game makes me feel. Like Rick Dangerous, Yolanda seems heavily invested in screwing over the player with trial-and-error level design that is only exacerbated by the game's lightning-fast speed. You have barely a moment to react before the level changes and half the platforms become engulfed in fire - including, invariably, the one you're standing on. Other platforms vanish as soon as you step on them (and that's almost always certain death) while others just appear out of the ether after a leap of faith.
The game seems to be built around the Twelve Labors of Heracles, with each stage being introduced with a wordy wall of text about killing the Nemean Lion or capturing the Cretan Bull or setting the timer on Zeus's VCR so it stops blinking "12:00" all the time. Yet the stages only go so far as to display whatever animal is the target of Heracles' wrath and tasks your tiny female avatar to get over there without being horribly murdered by the thousand deathtraps that fill the screen. It's extremely discombobulating.
Yolanda was published by our old friends Millennium - you might remember them from our twelfth ST-urday with the equally unjust and bizarre Kid Gloves - and developed by their frequent collaborators Vectordean, who also designed the James Pond series. I don't think this was one of their big hits.
Welcome to Yolanda! Once again we find more instances of the European video game industry's fascination with Roger Dean logos and Boris Vallejo/Frank Frazetta half-naked barbarian women. My favorite is that "Wassup" crab.The twelve labors aren't presented to you in any order that makes sense: the better to disorient you as you jerk from one scenario to the next after every death. Letting you try the same stage again to get the hang of how its arbitrary instant-death traps worked would be too easy, after all. Like some kind of baby's toy.Here's the first stage. I went to hit the "save screenshot" button and had already been killed by four spiders and being burned to death when the platform I was standing on decided to immolate itself. The Ceryneian Hind, meanwhile, is just chilling in the middle of the screen. Didn't have to do shit.I managed to capture this screen before instantly dying this time, so Yolanda's helping build up my reaction speed if nothing else. The crows from Dracula's Curse make an unwelcome return, but if I stand here for more than a second to wait for an opportune moment to pass by them the platform will catch on fire again. Where am I, California?I managed to acquire the impressive final score of "0", which I'm told isn't good enough to reach the high-score table. Yeah, I figured. This game's a jerk.What the hell is all this even? Did Dan Ryckert design this level?Naturally I don't quite manage to DK Jr. it across the top of the vines with dozens of fireballs dropping from the top of the screen every second.Actually, I just looked up the Ancient Greek myth of Yolanda. It speaks of a comely maiden who once wore the same dress as Hera to a big important Greek orgy, and so the spiteful goddess sent her to Platformer Hell in her underwear for eternity.The solution to this one was to jump to the last platform on the right and keep jumping to make new ones appear out of nowhere. So that was satisfying.The creators of the demo clearly didn't think anyone would actually defeat one of their obnoxious levels, so they cut the demo short and don't even let me register a high-score. Who pissed in these guys' Cornflakes? (Also there's an Insanely Hard mode? Is that what I was just playing? I really hope so.)
Robotz
Our last game is the shareware/freeware (what we used to call Indies) top-down shooter Robotz, with a Z. I actually kinda like this game, though maybe that's coming from a place where I just played one game with controls I couldn't figure out and two that seemed designed to cause me a hate-aneurysm. Either way, it's a slightly less frantic Robotron: 2084 clone that's straightforward but challenging in the way most shareware games from this era are. I can describe the game fully with just the handful of screenshots I took.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of information on this one. The title screen suggests it was developed or published (probably both, and it's probably one guy) by a "Project X". It also has a brief backstory:
"The deep space exploration ship DARWIN 8 has been invaded by hostile alien robots. As the last surviving crew member it is your job to deal with the problem."
Whoa, slow down there, Dostoyevsky. They're aliens as well as robots? Hold onto your buttz, my friends.
Project X presents Robotz. If this was Scrabble, we'd be kicking some ass.See, I like a game that does a lot with micro-sized characters. It's graphically sharp in the same way that the Bitmap Brothers games are (and, man, am I seeing a lot of clearly intentional similarities here). Anyway, the guy in the hat is me and the blobby turret things are the robots. There's also this bouncing red thing in a cage. These are generators and they pump power to the robots(z) to power their shields. Unless I take out all the generators, the robots can only be stunned and not destroyed.Once the generators are gone, the robots are easy pickings. They'll still slowly move towards you and fire whenever you're in range, but they're easy enough to avoid unless there's a huge number of them or they're getting too close.Here, for example, I will get trapped trying to destroy the generator (it takes about eight hits), so I'm better off getting some distance and taking it down from where the robots can't quite reach me.I should also mention that every wall and obstacle is electrified and will kill me instantly. On top of needing to evade the robots and their bullets, I have to be careful not to run into any of the walls around here.That's pretty much it. Destroy generators, kill robots, move to the next stage. I recall being entertained for days by various coverdisk freeware games, my enjoyment usually wearing off just before the next one arrived the following month. That's all you can really ask for with these free coverdisk games.
With that, let's wrap up the second of our Demo Derbies. The app stuff was harder to show off than I realized, largely because I forget how to use desktop accessories (you can't exactly just drag-and-drop them on the desktop) and the text files are all formatted in a weird way with its word wrapping. Like the games, the apps tended to be a mix of teasers for professional commercial products and full freeware experimental program files that some kid in his bedroom put together to make life with the Atari ST more convenient. Like the modding communities of today, there's something irresistibly appealing about working in a group to solve some problems and create content with easily accessible tools. Well, that is if you have any proficiency or talent with all this coding stuff. Me? I just write about video games. See you next week for more of that.
